This is my second collaborative effort with Wesley (the first was What Makes Us Special). My words are the ones innormal type while Wesley’s are in italics.

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Sex feels good and it stimulates the entire body. Muscles tighten and heart rate rises along with blood pressure, respiration and body temperature. The brain becomes flooded with dopamine, the ‘feel-good’ neurotransmitter. Finally, a feeling of oneness with the universe (or at least with the partner) washes over, clearing the mind. Sex is not just a physical and physiological experience but also a psychological and even spiritual one – and maybe that’s why some people shout “Oh, my God” during orgasm.

And what exactly is an orgasm, in technical terms? Dr. Prakash Kothari defines it as: “an explosive, cerebrally-encoded neuromuscular response at the peak of sexual arousal elicited by psychobiological stimuli, the pleasurable sensations of which are experienced in association with dispensable pelvic physiological concomitants.”

It appears that our body’s pleasurable response towards sex is encoded in our brains. Sex is therefore Darwinian; evolution made sex feel good because otherwise we would not be engaging in it considering the hardships and dangers of pregnancy and childbirth – dooming the fate of the species. In short, evolution made sex feel good because it is crucial to survival of the species.

As such, animals (and our prehistoric ancestors) start courtship and mating as soon as they become fertile because in the wild it’s a daily struggle between eating and trying not to get eaten, so it makes no sense waiting a few more years for adulthood before giving your contribution to the gene pool. In the wild, the animals mate at will but nature controls their population.

Now the problem starts when a certain species’ survival becomes too successful – when it has climbed to the top of the food chain because it has overpowered all of its known predators – to the point of overpopulation. I remember a part from The Matrix where Agent Smith asserts that humans are not mammals because mammals reproduce in accordance with the available food and water in the area. Humans, on the other hand, reproduce uncontrollably, exhausting resources and destroying ecosystems, and then move on to other places, repeating the process. And there is another organism that does just that: the virus.

Our species’ intellectual capacity and unique ability to shape our environment to such a high degree has earned us the enviable top perch in the natural order. We have virtually eliminated all threats to our survival of the predatory nature. We have driven some of nature’s best killing machines, the great beasts themselves, into near-extinction, surviving now only in zoos and nature preserves, existing now only at the mercy of man. The only other creatures left to prey on us are a few handful parasitic bugs and microbes, and even those we’ve developed effective drugs to rid our system of them. In short, we have become a species without a means of regulating ourselves. We have used our intellectual abilities to bypass nature’s checks and balances and now breed ourselves to oblivion.

Take for example the micro-ecosystem of an aquarium. A poorly designed and maintained aquarium seldom lasts long. The fishes may have been left to multiply beyond the capacity of the limited space or maybe the algae grew all over the place… either way, if the delicate balance of the ecosystem was upset due to uncontrolled, rampant growth, it soon finds its oxygen-nitrogen balance gone awry. It’s a concept every elementary student learns in science class. In an imbalanced environment, things will soon start dying out if there’s too much or too little of the required plants and animals to maintain the carbon cycle.

The earth is like a giant aquarium. Already we see the effects on the water supply, the climate, air quality, and over-all health of the species population suffering because of the scale in which man has tampered with the environment. But we have to use up the available resources to fuel our ever-rising population. It’s simple math, the more people there are in the world, the more forests we have to cut down to make our houses, and the more animals we have to kill for food. Our resource-renewal efforts haven’t quite matched the pace in which we use them up. Deniers may claim that climate change may not be due to man’s effects on the environment, or that we still have enough resources in the world to last for a few more hundred years, but one cannot deny that the world is now a dirtier place than it was a decade ago.

The Bible passage “go forth and multiply” probably did more damage to the environment than the discovery of fossil fuel. And now the Church is telling us that in controlling the disaster this “word of God” has caused the world we must use only ‘natural’ or Church-approved methods. But which is really more unnatural, artificial contraception or abstinence from something already hard-wired into our instincts? The latter totally denies something innate in our nature; the former merely prevents the environmentally-harmful side effects of too much of that nature. The latter is unreasonable and oppressive; the former is responsible.

Somewhere along the way, anything enjoyable became deemed evil by self-appointed moral police. Sure anything in excess is bad for you, but taken in moderation and with proper precautions, this falls in the category of “responsible recreation”. If some people think it improper, then by all means let them abstain from it. But those minority shouldn’t impose their lifestyle choices on the rest of the population. In the bigger scheme of things, which act is more evil? Wearing a condom or having kids you can’t raise?

Sex may lead to pro-creation but the two are still two totally distinct acts, no matter how much some belief systems may insist that they’re one and the same. When you start a fire, you aren’t obligated to go cook something. Sometimes, it’s enough just to enjoy the warmth of a blazing fire on a cold night. The same goes for sex. It’s a social activity and a recreational sport as well. From a liberal point of view, it’s not even that different from a couple going dancing (that’s why it’s also called the horizontal tango).

But somewhere along the way, generations of culture and tradition turned it taboo which left us where we are now – a species that treats sex as something either dirty or sacred (quite the irony there) instead of the natural act that all the other animals in the world seem to take for granted. Which begs the question – have we become too smart for our own good? Have we outsmarted ourselves in the process of winning the genetic race? While we enjoy the enviable luxury of being able to breed without fear of being some other animal’s lunch later, we have ironically become our own worst enemy by inventing ways to limit ourselves.

Sex is sex and procreation is procreation. The former lasts a night, the latter carries with it a responsibility of 18 years minimum taking care of your kid. It should always be the couple’s choice how far they’re willing to go because they’re the ones who are going to take care of the child, not the church, and certainly not those anti-contraceptive campaigners. So how silly is it to make up all these imaginary rules on how couples should have sex? If you plan to have only two kids because as a responsible parent, that’s all you can afford to raise, then there’s the possibility that you might only have sex twice in your whole married life. Try selling that proposition to all the married couples out there and see how far that gets you.

We don’t need religion to tell us that every baby born into the world is a wellspring of potential. But that’s generally the problem now, is it? So much untapped potential and no way to unlock it because how does a family earning minimum wage get all ten children fed, educated, and raised properly? Most families have no problem with the breeding… but the raising? Most people never even think about it. It’s a matter of quantity or quality, which, more often than not, makes for a poor strategy in trying to uplift one’s condition. The less there is to go around, the less chance of getting out of poverty. In that aquarium metaphor, introducing more fish doesn’t make things better, it’ll just force everyone to compete against each other for scarce resources, and not in a good way, as one can see with the escalating crime rate. In the end, we end up with a lot of people forced to do bad things in order to survive. And no amount of the church’s preachings will stop someone from breaking the law if the alternative is hunger.

In a religion where natural urges are deemed evil or immoral but having more children than you can raise responsibly is acceptable because it’s “a gift of god”, we end up with an escalating population growth that far surpasses the rate our infrastructure is able to cope with. The number of urban poor is rising exponentially each year, clear proof that the economic and social infrastructure development cannot match our population rise.

Yet there are still sectors of society who blindly claim that we are “not overpopulated”, that we have more space to grow. Space is not the issue here, it’s the problem of turning everyone into productive members of society. A typical family belonging to the urban poor will churn out a dozen babies without an inkling how to provide not only food and shelter for their brood, but how to turn them into productive adults. So they grow up into uneducated, unskilled vagrants that further tax our already over-burdened urban infrastructure. It’s a vicious cycle of uncontrolled growth.

Yes, it’s not the headcount per-se that determines whether we’re over-populated or not, rather how well resources are channeled to each individual. There are first-world countries that have denser urban populations than us but the big difference is that a greater percentage of their population are productive, able to work within the economy to provide for themselves instead of resorting to crime or waiting for charitable dole-outs.

Population growth should always follow the economic trends, not the other way around. If there are too many people and too few jobs to go around, we hit an economic crunch. It’s simple supply-and-demand : if you’ve got an over-supply of unemployed workers, their market values plummet. Employers can pay sub-standard wages because everyone is desperate to get any sort of work. With that level of salary, you end up living from paycheck to paycheck, unable to get out of the poverty cycle.

Let me make this clear: this is not about limiting how many children you’re allowed to have, it’s about responsible parenthood. If you can’t provide for your future offspring, then you should think twice about bringing them into the world. It’s your decision and your actions but it’s the children who will suffer for it. Children are not lottery tickets that you get as many as you can get your hands on, hoping that by playing the numbers game, one of them might eventually be your ticket out of poverty. Instead, that rare child who grew up in the slums that beats the odds of finishing school and gets a good job still ends up with the problem of having to support his parents and a dozen other unemployed siblings that didn’t fare as well.

In the wild, the weak do not live long enough to slow down the rest of the species; they either get eaten by predators or die from starvation because they cannot effectively hunt for survival. But we do not live in the wild, and we generally do not leave our offspring and other family members to fend for themselves. And since we are well above this law of the jungle that keeps populations in equilibrium with the available resources, the least we could do is to regulate our propagation so as not to overburden our already ailing planet. Now which is the more reasonable way of doing that, abstinence or contraception? Come to think of it, abstinence is prescribed by the same people who insist that we “go forth and multiply”. And look where that has brought us now.

DISCLAIMER: The opinions in this post do not necessarily represent the position of the Filipino Freethinkers.

Please take the time to read everything. It isn't that long.
It's a brief conclusion of the RH bill passing here in the Philippines.
This might help you better and rethink everything and also, to prepare yourselves for reality.
Excuse me, if it's a little badly written. I did it last night in one sitting. I didn't have the time to edit it. And I'm too lazy to fix it now. But I've been receiving good feedbacks from my readers anyway. So go ahead and just mind the issue in discussion.

I don't think this was ever contemplated in the NFP method, cause this would be considered unnatural by the moralists. However, as this pratice might increase the possibility of contractive the aids virus, this may be an exception to the rule against the use of condoms!hahaha

very interesting thread. nicely done. I agree with your views on this matter. And it is quite true.
I just have one question though and I don't think it's really any of a big deal or whatever..
but I think, it could or have some significance aswell.
You were talking about married couples having sex is human nature or, nature itself.
What about unmarried couples? which the church is really against with also. you know, premarital sex.
If you can give me the answer to this one question, that'll be cool. 🙂

As to your question about pre-marital sex, I believe that is expressly forbidden by the church's teachings that sex is only for married couples, ergo, sex outside of marriage is not allowed (ouch!). Then again, if this is actually in the bible, or is just man's interpretation, is another matter altogether.

Additional info for human vitae: it caused dissent in the church, dissenters (cardinals and bishops) called it another galileo affair and called the pope at the time a fool.

Accusations include: humans should get married only for procreation (Oscar Cruz's stand)
the main point of the dissent: the church should not meddle in intimate things such as couple sex lives and family planning practices.

Thanks for that added info. As for me, anything that's not specificaly written in the bible, is man's and not God's. Heck, I can come up with my own interpretations of the verses to suit my own needs. The dissent, of course, was expected…

Off course if one reads the bible and many of the verses are contradicted by the church. read about onan. Church teaching involve having followers follow them no matter what, infallibity, canon laws and ecumenical teachings etc, though those intentions were supposedly good, they only did more to split Christians apart.

if you want to know more about the main dissenters of human vitae; read on Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens. Looks like Fr. Bernas follows in his footsteps.

we have the same opinion about bible interpretations; I dont believe in Human Vitae; it is fairly recent (1968), a man-made (therefore flawed) encyclical and touches on three subjects that the church has little-to-no expertise in: biology, medicine and human sociology (ie. love and sex)

Whenever free will is trampled upon or when critical thinking is removed from the equation, dissent will always follow! In the same vein, when one imposes his will on others on matters outside his area of expertise, there will be people who, in the exercise of their critical thinking, will naturally disagree!

I may belong to the 70% you mentioned, but I live my life in accordance with the 10 commandments of my God which, to me, is where my chosen faith revolves in. All other pronouncements of the church leaders I subject to my critical thinking if it's worthy of my allegiance…

Hey same thinking Catholic! I stick to the 10 commandments – they are pretty universal. I also apply teachings from the new testament, particularly – parables. The fundies forget about the good samaritan – to them all non-catholics are going to hell.

Any recent proclemations from the RCC are subject to my critical thinking: Infallibility, Human Vitae and Crimen Solicitationis are some of the things I will openly call bull.

Thanks for that interesting article. I guess in the absence of any law prohibiting a particular act, humans will have to use their intellect to discern whether it is right or wrong and should follow his conscience accordingly. As no company can come up with a complete list of actionable offenses of its employees, I doubt if there is a country that has laws covering every possible crime…

i break 'do not covet thy neighbor's wife' alot. plenty of milfs around. my personal code of ethics dictates i will not hit on a married woman. if they initiated i follow my moral creed: "never deny a woman."

Here's an irony: leaders of the catholic religion, who are vowed to live a celibate life in service of God, commanding their flock (most of whom eventually marry) to abstain from making love to their spouses if they have no plans of having kids! tsk tsk tsk

"Our species’ intellectual capacity and unique ability to shape our environment to such a high degree has earned us the enviable top perch in the natural order…"

2) and yet, human intellect cant conquer nature
"
As such, animals (and our prehistoric ancestors) start courtship and mating as soon as they become fertile because in the wild it’s a daily struggle between eating and trying not to get eaten…

Now the problem starts when a certain species’ survival becomes too successful – … to the point of overpopulation….Humans, on the other hand, reproduce uncontrollably, exhausting resources and destroying ecosystems, and then move on to other places, repeating the process.

But which is really more unnatural, artificial contraception or abstinence from something already hard-wired into our instincts?"

the last sentence says that fighting hard-wired instincts are unnatural, hence is stupid and pointless.

___________

this is an interesting view of man — rational, yet controlled by his hard-wired instincts.

1) "human intellect conquers nature" – by 'nature' here we mean the world, or at least the other animals with whom we share our world

2) "and yet human intellect can't conquer nature" – by 'nature' here we mean human nature, or more specifically, our natural sexual urges. Moreover, we didn't say that we can't conquer this human nature – look at the celibate priests and those married couples who actually practice abstinence or rhythm methods for family planning. It's not impossible to conquer human nature on sexual urges – only stupid and pointless, especially if married couples who have the option of using condoms and pills are told by the Church to resort only to abstinence/rhythm.

– This is very true, except that I think it's more accurate to use the term "strongly influenced" instead of "controlled" in reference to our hard-wired instincts, because man's rationality gives him the capacity to transcend his instincts. 🙂

Only the sex part, and particularly for MARRIED COUPLES. It is stupid and pointless because we have a very convenient alternative (contraception) to enjoy the gifts of our nature without overpopulating our planet. 🙂

its ok to indulge in man's nature (whatever that is) as long as certain consequences are reigned in.

sex is an example. a man/woman should be allowed to have sex whenever, as long as reproduction is managed.

so, you'd use this same principle in other contexts as well?

lets say man's nature is to eat sweet food. the undesirable consequence is 2 get fat. if there is a technology out there that allows people to eat food in whatever volume and NOT get fat, u'd be on board. yes?

lets talk about science fiction, which u may be into. the movie surrogates is also an example. people can look like whoever they want. indulge in various pleasures with no ill effects. having surrogates, in principle, is a good thing?

I agree with the eat-sugar-but-not-get-fat part, but not with the Surrogates movie part, because while people can look like whoever they want and indulge in various pleasures, there ARE ill effects to the real person from lack of exercise (look what happened to the character of Bruce Willis – he can hardly walk).

I think surrogates, if the technology is made possible in the future, would be best left to dangerous jobs like mining and soldiering.

I think they already invented Xenical for that, so you could eat more without getting fat 🙂

But back to your original question Gabby… the food analogy may be one way of putting it, but I'd caution against any form of extreme indulgence as this was not the intent of the article.

A better analogy would be: if there was a way for diabetic patients to indulge in sweets once in a while without the serious medical repercussions, would you take it? If insulin shots are available, why not?

GabbyD wrote: "the only remaining problem is defining “negative consequences”…negative consequences is a concept with a moral, ethical dimension. something is ‘negative’ only in relation to a norm. negative is a relative term…this “norm” is actually what separates people ideologically."

I totally agree, especially with "'negative' is a relative term". If you look up 'morality' in Wikipedia, you will find a very long article with lots of cross references and hyperlinks.

So now the question is, where do we base our morality particularly on the issue of contraception? Do we base it on what the Catholic Church says?

This is true and I totally agree with you. We need to educate our people in the Phil about responsible parenthood and taking responsibility for everything (period.) This is one of the reasons why the Phil is a very poor country. Religion has blinded them and oppressed our people, making them mental slaves.
I come from a huge poor family because my parents are slaves of religion. Some of my siblings became psychotic(schizophrenic type) because of their environment. It was my aim to uplift our condition since I was a child..I am successful, I must say, because, I did not believe that anybody can help me but myself.
I did not wait for a "supreme being" or a knight in his shining armor to save me. I did it all by myself. I singlehandedly made our lives better.